The use of physical display devices for facilitating meetings is becoming increasingly popular. Depending on the environment, a physical display device may be one of a number of types (e.g. liquid crystal displays (LCDs), cathode ray tubes (CRTs), interactive whiteboards (IWBs) or other display panels etc.) and/or different sizes. Typically a physical display device is provided with video data from the video card in a single computing device such as a personal computer or the like, and positioned in a meeting room so as to be visible to all meeting participants. Such a physical display device is used to present slides, video data, photographs, charts and the like for use during presentations and for discussion. In meetings having multiple contributors, multiple physical display devices may be used and each connected in a one-to-one manner to a participant's respective computing device.
Multi-monitor computer systems comprise multiple physical display devices connected to a single computing device. Multi-monitor computer systems provide an increased display area for computer programs, and are becoming increasingly popular. In order to accommodate multiple physical display devices, video cards in many personal computers have multiple sockets to receive cables from more than one physical display device. Alternatively, some personal computers have multiple video cards to receive cables from more than one physical display device. In either case, video data generated by the video card(s) of the computing device in response to execution of one or more computer programs is output to a physical display device for display. Other multi-monitor computer systems have networked physical display devices where the physical display devices are connected via a wireless or wired network and video data is provided to the physical display devices via the network connection for display.
It is often desirable during a meeting to present video data from multiple source computing devices on a single physical display device. This is typically done by physically unplugging one of the physical display device's cables from one source computing device and plugging it into another. However it can be rather inconvenient and time-consuming to physically swap cables, especially in a multi-monitor computer system. Furthermore, physically removing a cable from a source computing device makes it impossible to display its video data along with another's simultaneously on the same physical display device.
As will be appreciated, improvements in the display of video data from multiple computing devices in multi-monitor computer systems are desired. It is therefore an object of the present invention at least to provide a novel method for displaying video data from multiple source computers in a multi-monitor computer system and a novel apparatus employing the method.